Soviets Hit Truck, Hold U.s. Soldiers

September 16, 1985|By Washington Post

WASHINGTON — Defense Department officials said Sunday that Soviet troops in East Germany deliberately bumped a U.S. military vehicle on duty there last week and detained two U.S. soldiers riding in it at gunpoint. The Americans were held about nine hours before being released unharmed.

The Sept. 7 incident involved members of the same liaison unit as U.S. Army Maj. Arthur D. Nicholson Jr., who was shot and killed by a Soviet sentry March 24 while trying to photograph Soviet military equipment in a garage-like storage shed near Ludwigslust, about 100 miles northwest of Berlin.

Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger confirmed the latest incident -- the fourth this year between Soviet troops and U.S. or British soldiers -- in a television appearance in which he sharply criticized the alleged treatment of the Americans.

Weinberger referred to only one person, but Pentagon officials said two Americans, both unarmed, were in the ''truck-like'' U.S. vehicle, which was leaving a Soviet communications site in the south western corner of East Germany. Neither U.S. soldier was identified.

''The Soviets bumped his truck deliberately when we were where we were supposed to be and doing what we are permitted to do under a treaty that's some 40 years old,'' Weinberger said on CBS-TV's Face the Nation.

''When he attempted to get out to fix the truck, they pushed him back into the truck and held him at gunpoint, detained him for roughly nine hours and generally behaved in the same way which they did in the incident in which Maj. Nicholson was killed and murdered,'' Weinberger said.

The United States has protested the action to Soviet authorities but has not received ''anything very positive'' in response, Weinberger said.

The Nicholson incident, which President Reagan termed an ''unwarranted tragedy,'' sparked a long and bitter exchange between U.S. and Soviet officials, including U.S. demands for an apology and compensation for Nicholson's family.

An assistant military attache at the Soviet Embassy here was expelled in the wake of the controversy.

Weinberger said Sunday, however, that he did not think the latest incident would affect Reagan's scheduled Nov. 19-20 summit meeting in Geneva with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Asked why the incident was not announced shortly after it occurred, Weinberger said, ''We're trying our best to get the condition corrected. We aren't interested in publicity.'' He said the administration was not trying to keep the incident quiet.

Weinberger said that after the Nicholson incident, top Soviet military officials in East Germany had said they would ''tell their people not to use force,

and either they're not keeping those promises or they have a very poorly disciplined unit.''

Defense Department spokesman Robert B. Sims said Sunday that the latest incident occurred at about midday German time as the U.S. vehicle attempted to leave a Soviet communications site in the Suhl area. The U.S. vehicle was not in a restricted area, Sims said.

The U.S. vehicle ''became entangled or stuck. That's when the ramming or grazing or whatever the Soviet truck did occurred. . . . When it became immobile, the Soviet truck approached at a high rate of speed and hit our vehicle,'' Sims said. ''Then Soviet soldiers surrounded it, directing our people to remain inside.''

Later the Soviets towed the immobilized American vehicle to another site and photographed it. It subsequently was returned to the custody of the Americans, who spent two hours repairing it and then left. The nine hours referred to by Weinberger may have included the repair time, Sims said.

The incident was the second involving two military missions since the one in which Nicholson was killed. On July 13, Col. Roland Lajoie, the commander of the U.S. unit, was injured whn his car was rammed from behind by a Soviet vehicle near Satzkorn, outside Berlin.